The Jihad: We're All in This Together

Don Feder delivered the following speech to the Americans for A Safe
Israel National Conference ("America and Israel: The Present Danger")
held in New York City on December 3, 2006.

You have a problem. It's a problem shared by Jews in Hebron, Serbs in
Kosovo, Hindus in the Kashmir, Catholics in Lebanon, and Americans
walking the streets of New York.

Consider the inter-connectedness of the following incidents, all of
which took place in the past few months:

* In Indonesia, three Christian schoolgirls were beheaded.
* In Iraq, a Syrian Orthodox priest was kidnapped, tortured, and
murdered.
* In Somalia, a nun was shot to death as she left the hospital
where she worked, tending the sick and dying.
* In Lebanon, just days ago, a cabinet minister was assassinated.
* In Britain, authorities uncovered a conspiracy in which
native-born Brits plotted to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights,
killing as many as 3,000.
* In Afghanistan, suicide bombers are at work again.
* In Iraq, they never stopped. Additionally, the week before last,
a group of worshippers were abducted from a mosque, doused with gasoline
and burned to death in what's described as "sectarian violence."
* In France, a high school philosophy teacher is in hiding after
very credible death threats following publication of a September 19
commentary in Le Figaro.
* Some 139 people died in riots in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan - following the publication of Danish cartoons.
* Europe is experiencing the worst wave of anti-Semitic violence
since Kristallnacht. The former director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum
reports there an average of 12 assaults a day on Jews in Paris.
* In Kosovo, 90 percent of Serbs gave been ethnically cleansed
from the province since 1999. The rest live in a state of siege.
* In Mumbai, India, a series of blasts killed almost 200.
* In Gaza, terrorists recently celebrated the latest "ceasefire"
by raining more rockets on southern Israel.
* And the leader of more than a billion Catholics received death
threats and demands that he convert after giving a speech in which he
called for a balance of faith and reason, and quoted a 14th century
Byzantine emperor.

What do the foregoing have in common?

To quote columnist Mark Steyn, in his excellent book ''America Alone:
The End of The World As We Know It,'' it begins with an "I" and ends
with a "slam."

I am not saying that all Muslims are terrorists. I am saying that almost
all terrorists are Muslims--the mother of all no-brainers--and that
Islam is a faith that is, shall we say, terrorism-friendly. I challenge
you to name another faith in which your entry into heaven is assured by
killing those of another faith in a holy war.

I am not saying that Muslims are inherently bad people. Most Muslims are
like most people everywhere. I am saying that there are elements in
Islam that incline adherents to commit the crimes detailed a moment ago.
I am saying--and let me be clear about this--that a faith embraced by as
many as 1.3 billion people worldwide contains within it the seeds of the
evil we see all around us--seeds which require only the right conditions
to germinate. It all goes back to the Koran.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are in the midst of a world war, one every bit
as deadly as the Cold War, and with a potential for devastation to rival
World War II. Actually, the Cold War is a bad analogy. For perhaps the
20 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, almost no one was willing
to die for communism. Today, ten of millions--perhaps hundreds of
millions--around the world would gladly die, and kill, for Dar Islam.
But we make a fatal mistake if we think of Islam only in terms of
suicide bombings, sniper attacks, death threats, forced conversions,
female genital mutilation, honor killings, jihad-this and fatwah-that.
Every bit as important is what's going on in maternity wards from
Brussels to Bombay.

Of the 10 nations with the lowest birthrates, nine are in post-Christian
Europe. And the ten countries with the highest fertility rates? That's
right--starts with an "I" and ends in a "slam."

Fertility rates in the Muslim world look like this: Niger (7.46 children
per woman), Mali (7.42), Somalia (6.76), Afghanistan (6.69), and Yemen
(6.58). The Palestinian woman in Gaza who--at age 64--just became the
world's oldest suicide bomber was the mother of nine and (at last count)
the grandmother of 41.

Between 1970 and 2000, while the share of the world's population
represented by the industrialized nations declined from just under 30
percent to just over 20 percent, the share accounted for by the
wonderful world of jihad rose from 15 percent to 20 percent.

Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, the United States is
experiencing a veritable population explosion--with a birth rate of
2.11, just about replacement level. From there, it's demographic winter
as far as the eye can see: Canada (1.5), Germany (1.3), Russia and Italy
(1.2) and not-so-sunny Spain (1.1). The latter three nations could cease
to exist, as they are currently constituted, within the next 50 years.
According to a Washington Times story, by 2015, more than half the
soldiers in the Russian Army will be Muslims. And you thought the Czar
was bad! By 2020, over 20 percent of Russia's population will be reading
the Koran, religiously.

Within the lifetimes of some in this room, the United Kingdom, France,
Belgium, and the Netherlands could go Islamic green. For the present,
Muslims comprise 10 percent of the French population. But of "Frenchmen"
under 20, fully 30 percent share the faith of Osama bin Laden, Baby
Assad, and Iran's nut-cake leader.

You can talk all you want about population control being the happy
result of higher standards of living, careers for women, sex education,
contraception and access to abortion. In fact, it's becoming the
assisted suicide of the West. What it really comes boils to is this:
Confident societies have babies. People with a sense of mission have
children. Nations with a sense of destiny and faith in the future fill
maternity wards, and nurseries and cradles.

Those that believe in God as a vague, philosophical concept (if He
exists at all), don't. Instead of the future, they put their trust in
401(k) plans, elaborate state welfare systems, and gated retirement
communities.

There are still enough of those of us who care enough to act. But the
hour grows proverbially late.

Everyone is so focused on their own thing that they miss the larger
picture. Zionists rightly worry about Palestinian terrorism and fate of
Israel should Judea, Samaria, and Gaza become Hamas-istan.

Serbs decry the destruction of ancient churches, monasteries, and
shrines in Kosovo--not to mention the ethnic cleansing that followed
NATO's victory over Slobodan Milosevic--and worry about the province
being permanently detached from Serbia.

Hindus anguish over the ongoing violence in Kashmir, supported by
Pakistan, which has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past 20 years,
as well as terrorist acts in the rest of India.

Groups like Voice of the Martyrs meticulously document Christian
persecution in the Muslim world. Lebanese Christians lament the demise
of the last Christian country in the Middle East and Hezbollah creating
a state-within-a-state. Coptic Christians complain about the treatment
of their co-religionists in Egypt. And the beat goes on. But these are
all part of a seamless chador. What happens in Kosovo affects the
Kashmir. As Judea and Samaria go, ultimately, so go Lebanon and London.
In retrospect, it's easy to see that a number of events in the 1930s
were steps leading to the Second World War: Hitler's rise to power, the
remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia,
German, and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese
conquest of Manchuria, and so on. It's always easier to see the
interconnectedness of events and the significance of trends in
retrospect--well after the fact. But at least after Pearl Harbor, most
Americans understood that they were at war. It's been five years since
this generation's Pearl Harbor, and most of us still don't have a clue.
When word of Pearl Harbor reached London, Winston Churchill called
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The conversation ended with the British prime
minister telling the American president: "Well, we are all in this
together now." As indeed they were, and as they probably had been since
the early 1930s, though almost no one was aware of it at the time.
Well, my friends, we truly are all in this together--Jews and Catholics,
Lebanese Christians, and Hindus, Orthodox Serbs, and Indonesian
Christians. Until we begin to understand that, we have no hope of
countering the global jihad. When Zionists start caring about the fate
of Serbs in Kosovo, when Hindus support Jewish communities in Judea and
Samaria (designated the West Bank), when Serbs stand up for Indian
Kashmir, then we will begin making progress.

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The American Council for Kosovo is an independent U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a better American understanding of the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija and of the critical American stake in the province's future.

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